Brave Bison Group plc (BBSN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome to the Brave Bison plc Annual Results Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions]. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll. And I would now like to hand you over to Executive Chairman, Oliver Green. Good morning to you.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Brave Bison Group plc Investor Meet Company presentation. I'm Oli Green, Executive Chairman. Our slides today will last around 40 minutes, and we'll have some time for questions at the end of our presentation. Joining me on the call today is my brother Theo, our Chief Growth Officer; Philippa, our CFO; and we're also joined today by Tim, the CEO of MiniMBA; and Mark Ritson, Founder of MiniMBA, major shareholder in Brave Bison and one of the marketing industry's preeminent thought leaders. For those shareholders that are new to the story or prospective investors, Brave Bison is a marketing and technology business that works with global brands. We work with some of the largest advertisers on the planet, retailers like Primark and New Balance, technology companies like Google and LinkedIn, consumer groups like Nestle and Carlsberg and sports organizations like the PGA Tour and Formula One. And we sell these brands a combination of services, consultancy, training and distribution across our media channels. Now we operate across 3 different business units. Sports and entertainment is where we own and operate channels across digital platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat. We create, license and distribute content across our channels and the platforms pay us a revenue share on all advertising that flows across our network. We also work directly with rights holders like the PGA Tour, the ICC, US Open and Real Madrid to help them leverage social and digital channels to grow their fandoms and drive revenue. Consultancy and Marketing Services is where we sell performance media, social media and strategy consulting services to global businesses. Our team of specialists works across the U.K., Europe, Australia and India, and our mandates are almost always growth orientated. Clients come to us with engagements that are aimed at growing revenue, building brand value and launching in new markets or to new audiences. Marketing skills and capability is where we sell MBA-level training to marketers that want to develop their skills and be better at their jobs, but I will let Mark and Tim give you a proper introduction to this business unit and our vision for the future later on in the presentation.

2025 was a really transformational year for Brave Bison. In addition to some strong financial results, we announced 5 acquisitions made during the period. We acquired Engage, a sports marketing company at the beginning of the year. We acquired Builtvisible, a search engine optimization specialist that works with some large customers, particularly now on how they appear in large language models when people are searching through chatbots. We acquired The Fifth, an influencer marketing company that was owned by News Corp, News UK. We acquired MTM, an insights and strategy consulting business later on in the year. And we acquired MiniMBA, a flagship brand for Brave Bison that the team will give you more information about. Another thing that's really exciting about the end of this year is that 54 employees inside Brave Bison are now share option holders. That's out of a total of U.K. employees of around 250. We see this as being a major differentiator versus our competitors, and we're really pleased to see this number as high as it is. 2025 also marks the sixth year that myself, Oliver and Philippa have been at the helm of Brave Bison. Since 2020, net revenue has increased by over 12x. Adjusted EBITDA has grown from around 0% to 20%. And since 2021, we've managed to grow adjusted basic earnings per share at a compound annual growth rate of around 18%. The last 6 years have been tremendously exciting for us as a team, and we look forward to the years ahead.

We saw a real step change in our financial performance in 2025, driven by the 5 acquisitions that Theo has referenced and also organic growth. From an organic growth perspective, Sports and Entertainment had a standout year with strong performance from the channels we manage on behalf of Sports Federations and rights holders driving significant growth, particularly in the second half of the year. We also saw double-digit organic growth in performance marketing within our Consultancy and Marketing Services division, driven in part by strong demand for our new AI-enabled offerings. There were, however, some reductions in revenue from social media marketing as a large client, which had driven growth in 2024, moved to more of a roster model, hence, reducing our revenue share. Our margins dropped slightly to 20%. This was pulled down at the start of the year by some loss-making acquisitions in Engage and The Fifth , which took a few months to optimize as we move them onto our platform and realize cost savings to shift them into profits. Overall, we saw strong adjusted basic EPS growth of 14% on the prior year. The next slide outlines the adjusting items in the P&L and the reconciliation between our statutory profit before tax and its adjusted EBITDA. The largest adjusting item at GBP 2.3 million is unsurprisingly acquisition costs. This includes fees related to our GBP 15.5 million fundraising in July alongside legal fees and due diligence costs. After this, we have amortization of acquired intangibles, which relates to the amortization of the customer relationships, brands and online content generated as a result of the acquisitions. We also had GBP 0.9 million of restructuring costs during the year. These relate to an unused office lease, some duplicate IT contracts and staff termination costs associated with restructuring due to the acquisitions. Finally, share-based payments relate to some noncash charges relating to staff incentive plans. The largest cash inflow during the year came from share issuance, following our oversubscribed fundraising ahead of the MiniMBA acquisition. The main cash outflows in the year were on the acquisition payments themselves and then the associated acquisition costs highlighted earlier. We were also pleased to pay our maiden dividend during the year of GBP 0.3 million. Working capital was impacted by the differing profiles of the acquisitions. Engage, in particular, came with significant liabilities following cash flow problems and MiniMBA and The Fifth as carve-outs also have balance sheets at the point of acquisition, which didn't reflect the normal course of trading. This means that we are seeing a small negative change in working capital here despite actually ending the year in a strong working capital position. Q4, in particular, saw strong operating cash flow off the back of the performance of the Sports and Entertainment division. And this resulted in the year-end net cash position of GBP 4.3 million, which was significantly ahead of expectations. We had anticipated being in a slight net debt position at the year-end. Overall, our net assets increased from GBP 21.3 million to GBP 39.1 million. There was a significant increase in noncurrent assets, driven by the intangible assets associated with the acquisitions. Bank loans also increased during the year. We agreed a GBP 10 million revolving cash facility with Barclays at a margin of 1.75% over base rate, which we used to partially fund the MiniMBA and MTM acquisitions. At the year-end, we had GBP 6 million drawn on to this facility, but we do expect to repay this in full by the end of this year. Our lease liabilities increased slightly during the year as we took on additional office space near our main London headquarters to accommodate MTM. For the first time, we have recognized deferred consideration liabilities in relation to some of the acquisitions. We expect these to total GBP 1.3 million to be paid out over the course of FY '26 and then a further GBP 2.8 million, which will be payable over the course of the next 5 years. These are based on the fair value of expected future payments for recent acquisitions, but GBP 2.7 million of these payments are contingent on the performance of the acquisition as well as continued employment.

So in terms of where we feel the business is today, FY '26 has started rather well. In particular, we have seen some quite substantial growth from MiniMBA, around 18% year-on-year for the first cohort that kicked off in April. And that follows a significant amount of work that Tim and Mark and the team have done to MiniMBA since we acquired the business from Centaur. The other thing that's gone rather well has been continued success in our Sports and Entertainment division. Last year, we ran a number of live streamed events that had quite interesting and new monetization models. We weren't sure by the end of last year how recurring that revenue would be, but we've been really pleased to see a number of our big channels run live streamed events in the first half of this year. I think that our acquisition of a strategic shareholding in System1 is also something that is very exciting about Brave Bison. We are working constructively with the Board of System1 to maximize shareholder value. And we've been very pleased to hear that the business has been trading well. The company has made an announcement to that effect, and we've recorded an unrealized gain of GBP 1.7 million on the investment that we made in March. The balance sheet is in good shape. As Philippa alluded to, we were in a net cash position at the year-end, but that included substantial accruals that we are expecting and have paid out to a number of our channel partners. We believe we will be in a real net cash position by the end of June 30. In fact, we are at the moment. And that's despite us investing approximately GBP 1.5 million in cash to acquire about a 6% stake in System1 in addition to the shares that we acquired for shares. We were also really pleased to announce the appointment of Yvonne as Non-Executive Director and Chair of the Audit Committee. Yvonne is an incredibly experienced FTSE and AIM CFO. She was one of the longest-serving CFOs on the London Stock Exchange at the point of her retirement from JSG last year. And it's important that we are showing to our investors and to the wider community how the Board of Brave Bison is evolving as the company is now substantially bigger than it was this time last year. I will now hand over to Mark Ritson, who will talk to you about the MiniMBA.

Thanks, Theo. Hello, everyone. What a pleasure. I normally only get to talk to marketers. So it's lovely to broaden out for a brief moment and talk to a more diverse group. So let me tell you a bit about myself. I'm the founder of MiniMBA and to some degree, the main product, I guess. So I was a marketing professor. I did a PhD in marketing at Lancaster University, went off to America, where I was a professor at the University of Minnesota, visiting professor at MIT. Then back to London Business School for about 7 years as a professor there, then to Melbourne Business School. And all told, I almost did 25 years as a marketing professor before I packed it in. I was very well regarded globally as one of the top MBA teachers. I won the teaching prize at MIT, the teaching prize at London Business School, the teaching prize at Melbourne Business School for my marketing and brand teaching. I'm an acknowledged writer. I've been running a column on marketing for about 20 years. I'm 7 times. I think, that's a record British Columnist of the Year, in the B2B sector, in the PPA awards. I beat Jeremy Clarkson once, that was good. And that writing has really propelled me to a much higher level of global recognition in marketing. And finally, I'm not an academic's academic, and I'm happy to say that. I was one of the more applied members of most of the faculties I worked in. And throughout my life as a marketing professor, I was working at a very high level with some of the world's biggest companies, McKinsey, Baxter. I spent 13 years in France consulting for LVMH at the C-level with some of the world's biggest brands. So I have a very practical experienced skill set as well and a very good Rolodex connected to some of the most senior marketers around the world. And that really was my combination. The key moment that happened to me happened 10 years ago, I decided to stop being a marketing professor, and I decided to create this thing the MiniMBA. Next slide. So first of all, what the h*** do we mean by a MiniMBA? Well, it's mini because it's only 12 weeks long. It's mini because we're only covering the marketing part of the MBA. There are many more flavors, but the bit I taught was marketing. So you're getting the marketing part of the MBA. And in a nutshell, it's mini because it's 100% online and accessible anywhere. You don't have to travel to a campus. That's important to grasp what we've been doing. We're way ahead of the curve at MiniMBA and have been for a long time. Really, there are 2 extremes in management training. There are these rather terrible online courses taught by people that simply couldn't get away with it in a proper classroom, but they're very accessible and they're low price. At the other end of the extreme, they're spending 2 years in Cambridge or somewhere doing an MBA. It's brilliantly done. It's extremely prestigious, high level, but not everyone has 2 years and GBP 100,000 to spend on training. And in the middle, there's MiniMBA. We have all the kudos and delivery and skills and knowledge of a top-tier MBA training in marketing. That's what I used to do. But we're very accessible, both in terms of doing the course, paying for it and so on. We're in that sweet spot that really very few others can occupy. And we've built a very successful program over the last 10 years. What makes the program unique, first of all, as you can see, is we're a global program. Yes, we pull heavily from the U.K. and Australia because they've been the 2 bases. The team are based in the U.K. I'm mostly based in Australia. But what makes that fascinating is a typical class on MiniMBA might have 2,000 marketers on it. We'd easily and often pull from more than 40 countries. And so we have a ton of countries, big countries, where 1, 2% of the class are coming from that country. So we have enormous potential to grow our footprint in these other markets. And frankly, it's something we've only just turned our attention to. We're also unusual because we're almost exactly 50% B2C in the sense we recruit an individual marketer who wants to train themselves. But at the same time, about half of our revenue comes from B2B companies putting a team of their marketers through the program. And as you can see, our clients are a who's who of all the major marketing companies in the world. We train the very best, and we keep getting them to come back and give us more. We are almost uniquely placed in the sense, and I'd love to pretend that this was part of our strategy, but we just got lucky here. We pull beautifully from a diverse set of sectors. We're not a specialty program. As you can maybe see from our pie chart there, we pull almost equally from FMCG, from pharma, from agencies, from finance, from telcos, from consulting, from banking. We do well across the board. And again, that places us in a really unique situation. We're pulling from 40, 50 countries. We're pulling from all the major sectors. If you look at the seniority of the people on the program, it goes all the way from C-suite VP down to 2, 3 years of experience. We really are beautifully positioned. Next slide. And the results speak for themselves. We've now trained more than 40,000 marketers, again, around the world. And the secret of our success is really very simple. We're the best training in marketing in the world. And most people who complete our program will tell you the same thing. Our Net Promoter Score, which is a very good metric of satisfaction, sits at an Apple-like threshold of plus 78. And more importantly, when we survey our marketers when they complete the course, usually, more than 90% tell us that it's made them immediately a better marketer, around 95% tell us it's made them more confident. And generally, we get comments like this is the best thing I've ever done. Why didn't I do it 20 years ago? This has been life changing. So it's a jewel of a program and one that's reputation is spread around the world. Next slide. It's important I give you the context about marketing, so you understand the potential of what we're doing at MiniMBA. So if we just look at the marketing sector, it's not like finance or accounting. We just completed a big project with Ipsos, the research firm. And one of the things we've learned is as you travel around U.K., Australia, Canada, U.S., only about 1/3 of marketers, these are people with marketing in their job title actually have any formal training in marketing. So there's a huge opportunity for the 2/3 of marketers that aren't trained in the thing they do to get a 12-week training in it that's widely seen as being world-class. And that's particularly important because our Ipsos research reveals if you actually get some training in marketing, what do you know, you become 5, 6x more likely to actually know about marketing and be able to pass a test in it. you get better at it, you get more confident, you get better rewarded. So what we're enjoying, I think, is a combination of 2 things. We're one of the strongest brands in this training space for marketing. And also this world of training in marketing is a very high potential category, high potential because most marketers haven't been formally trained yet and high potential because the era of classrooms is coming to an end. When I was a young marketer, we would fly to Edinburgh or Paris for a 3- or 4-day training course in a hotel. That's simply not tenable anymore for most organizations. And we are well placed to enjoy that transition because we've been in this market already for the last 10 years, learning and developing a competence to deliver always on spectacular quality training at scale. Next slide. And so another highlight other than joining the Brave Bison family, which has been a phenomenal catalyst for our business has been having Tim Plyming on board. We have a team of almost 20 now based out of the U.K. and Tim has been our CEO, driving growth and has made an enormous impact on the business. And I'm going to pass it over to Tim now, who's going to explore and give you a little bit more detail about MiniMBA. Over to you, Tim.

Great. Thank you, Mark. And I have the privilege of working alongside Mark and our team as CEO of MiniMBA. I've held several leadership roles at global institutions, including the BBC, the British Museum, mostly spearheading, pioneering digital-led projects across media and education. Prior to MiniMBA, I launched a new commercial business out of the Open University focused on new approaches to executive education. I oversaw the acquisition of the business by Brave Bison in the summer of last year, but we couldn't be happier in our new home. Over the last 8 months, we've successfully integrated central business operations and are benefiting massively from wider Brave Bison Group capability as we develop new products and services, particularly focused on the integration of AI tools and services. MiniMBA has delivered consistent revenue growth since the presentation of our first course in 2016, with an average CAGR of 46% to the end of 2025. The business is really well positioned for global scalability with strong brand recognition, untapped markets and a well-defined product development plan. We arrived at Brave Bison last summer with a clearly defined growth roadmap. And I'm pleased to say that we've already made great progress on delivery. Let me highlight in a couple of minutes some elements of that growth plan. We're accelerating territory expansion. Today, as Mark said, the MiniMBA is dominant in the U.K. and Australia. They're our 2 biggest markets, and they'll continue to grow. But around 1% of our enrollments come from each of 30 other countries, including Sweden, Germany, the U.S., India, South Africa and Brazil. It's a customer base that's already there. It's growing organically, and we are investing in marketing to grow these territories. To drive awareness of Mark Ritson and MiniMBA, we've identified new global publishing partnerships in the form of regular columns from Mark with additional thought leadership content. This mirrors the early growth of the business through our partnership with Marketing Week in the U.K. And we've identified strategic global partnerships to support our reach. We've developed our enterprise go-to-market strategy, positioning the MiniMBA as a strategic capability partner, helping organizations to embed foundational marketing knowledge across teams as they navigate a rapidly changing marketing sector. We're investing in our people, making key hires into our senior team, including a Commercial Director and an enterprise sales lead. We're working with MTM, the Brave Bison-owned strategy and research consultancy to develop a skill and capability assessment tool, allowing our enterprise customers to create tailored learning and development plans and align team capabilities with their business strategy. And finally, we're investing in our technology, with the launch of a new website supported by Brave Bison Group expertise as well as the development of an enhanced learner platform. And I'm pleased to say we're already seeing the results. We've recently started April presentation of our courses, trading well ahead of Board expectations, delivering 18% growth year-on-year. There's been positive progress against our enterprise-focused go-to-market strategy with large enterprise deals being a significant driver of our growth. At the start of February this year, we announced that we secured our largest enterprise contract to date, a EUR 1.3 million agreement with a large FMCG group to deliver a bespoke version of our MiniMBA brand management program to 1,700 of their employees across the Asia Pacific region through 2026. Yesterday, we announced a 3-year enterprise partnership with Omnicom Oceania, one of the largest marketing communication groups in the Asia Pacific region. The agreement covers 1,200 of their people across MiniMBA in marketing, brand management and management programs with participants drawn both from Omnicom employees and clients. We're reaching more marketers globally through our new publishing partnerships, including Adweek in the U.S., The Drum in the U.K., Mumbrella in Australia, Resumé in Sweden and Horizont in Germany. Combined, these partnerships are delivering 10x the weekly reach that we previously had through Marketing Week, with Mark's columns consistently occupying the #1 read position. We partner well and we're known for it. This year, we've launched strategic partnerships with The Marketing Society, connecting us to an influential global community of 3,000-plus senior marketers as well as with The Marketing Academy, a global community of over 1,500 marketers. I'll now hand back to Mark, who will outline some of our future growth plans for the business. Mark, over to you.

Thanks, Tim. We've got a really long roadmap, and we're very good about coming up with lots of growth ideas, but not embarking on them all at once. At the moment, there are 3 things that we are immediately interested in, in terms of our growth other than continued geographic expansion. The first one is elective portfolio. So when you do a real MBA, it's normally 2 years. Year 1 is the core, year 2 is a series of electives. We effectively teach the core course of marketing. That's what I used to teach at business school. But what we will bring out in the next 12 months is an elective portfolio, I think, at this stage of always on more practical electives, slightly shorter courses that focus on all the challenges that marketers face taught by extraordinarily well-respected marketers and academics and by myself as well. The attraction here is obvious. We have 40,000 alumni. They love the program. They've stayed in touch with us. We can essentially cross-sell these courses. But also it's a 2-way street. We can attract people into these more practical shorter courses and then upstream into the MiniMBA as well. So we see that as a huge growth area and an obvious bolt-on that we've been waiting to get right, and we're currently in process. Obviously, we're interested in AI, not in a superficial way. We've been working on this for 2 years now. There are 2 places where we see AI having an impact immediately in our business. The first is in learner functionality. So at the moment, I do a lot of Q&A work. We do a lot of digital sessions with our classes. The opportunity to augment that with an AI-created avatar who is permanently available to each of our marketers on the course and after they complete the course, trained on all of my hundreds of thousands of hours of material and thinking and papers means essentially a really significant value add and something that fits beautifully into where MiniMBA sits. So we will try to develop a distinctive AI-learner capability in the next 12 months and add it to our offer. We see that as really a really important caveat. We've also seen other organizations, if I'm honest with you, like the World Federation of Advertiser asked me, and I certainly gave them permission to create an avatar of me several years ago to give talks, and it was very popular. So others have already done this. We're going to do it better and with more authenticity and monetize it. At the same time, we also see AI having an impact, obviously, in the world of marketing. We've been working now for almost 2 years with American partners on a specific AI planning tool, which bolts beautifully into the MiniMBA marketing system. And we see a real opportunity to offer marketers and alumni this AI planning tool, partly designed by me and trained in by me, which gives marketers essentially a very advanced AI marketing planning toolkit that frankly produces marketing plans and strategies way beyond anything that human teams are capable of. And we see that again as another huge area of growth. So those 3 are exciting areas, and they're already underway. My bigger -- if you caught me after a couple of beers, my bigger long-term ambition for MiniMBA is that it becomes the blue book. And what I mean by that is older marketers like me who were trained in the 20th century were all trained through the blue book of Professor Philip Kotler. It was the default way that marketers learned their trade. The days of textbooks are clearly coming to an end. And if we got this right, we truly believe we could be the default training system for most good global marketers. We could replace the blue book. Now that's a huge aspiration, but I think we've proven that we do have the capability to reach that far. And if I can end with just a couple of other asides, we're a big part of Brave Bison, and there's probably 2 other things that I would share with shareholders or potential shareholders. The first is I'm 55 years old. That's the prime time for a business school ex-professor like me. It's like being a 24-year-old Premier League footballer. I've got the chops. I've got the reputation. I've got 250,000 followers on LinkedIn. People know me. I've got the Rolodex. I'm in my prime. And yet I still have the hunger and drive and ambition to really push forward. And so this MiniMBA of ours is really -- has come along at the right time. And the second thing is I've put my own money here, and I would encourage you to do the same thing. I've put about GBP 4 million into Brave Bison. And that's partly based on what I've seen. We were very impressed with Oli and Theo when we first talked to them as one of the potential buyers. And what we've seen since has only grown more impressive. Their vision for the business and also, frankly, how they manage and how they lead is exceptional. I'm a very difficult person to impress. And I think they are both young and exceptional and those are things to bet on. So I've put my own money into this. And I really think Brave Bison has a vision for the industry that I'm delighted to be part of. Anyway, enough of that, I'll hand it back now, I think, to Theo.

To Oli.

To Oli, I'm sorry.

Thank you, Mark. Thank you, Tim. So the topic du jour is very much AI. And the first thing I wanted to say is that for decades, the global marketing holdcos have had this structural advantage. They always could simply outdeliver everyone else through their scale of headcount, their offices and their production capacity. But that structural advantage is now gone. Delivery has been commoditized by AI. What used to require hundreds of people in multiple time zones can now be executed by a much smaller specialist team with the right AI tooling. Speed, focus and the ability to re-architect from the ground up now beats scale and legacy process and the former are exactly the attributes of a challenger business like Brave Bison. Now the advertising market is moving away from outputs and towards outcomes. Clients want revenue and they want growth, and they'll pay a premium to the partners that can actually deliver it for them. Consequently, the value in partners is transferring away from execution and delivery and towards senior counsel, cultural intelligence and creative excellence, all underpinned by the latest AI technology. This is the sort of work that compounds for clients and commands premium economics. Now we like to categorize our AI work streams into 3 buckets. Efficiency is where we use our AI tooling and AI-enabled workflows to do things faster and cheaper. Effectiveness is where we use AI technology to improve the quality of our work. Things that simply weren't possible or economic to do a year ago can now be completed by a Brave Bison consultant emboldened with the right AI system. Evolution is where we're selling brand-new AI-related services. Large global enterprises know they need to leverage AI technology, but their scale and complexity can make adoption and change management difficult. This is where we can support our clients with agent development, alongside training and consultancy. Now BBX is our AI operating system. Now some companies use AI as a set of tools, but we're going further. We're infusing AI into our underlying business processes so that work, tasks and decisions all live, flow and get completed in a single centralized AI system. AI won't be something our teams go to, to get a task done. AI will exist inside the workflow. And by the end of this year, AI will live inside Brave Bison's nervous system. We're currently in the process of documenting all of the tasks that we perform for our clients. SEO reports, media audits, budget optimization, audience insights, and we're turning these tasks into reusable, automated AI skills that all of our teams can access at the click of a button. Every department and every function will have these AI skills and agents embedded in standardized workflows alongside our teams to dramatically increase productivity and effectiveness. Now our model will be one of augmentation. Humans will provide the thinking and the judgment and AI will do the execution. Things like cultural intelligence, creative excellence and senior counsel, I believe, will actually trade for a premium to today. Next slide, please. So clients will get more time with our best people and seniority becomes the product, execution becomes abundant. Brave Bison will also become an even more compelling place to work. The best talent wants to direct intelligent systems and shape outcomes, not just push pixels and update status decks.

AudienceGPT is a tool that we built ourselves over the last 18 months. It's based on OpenAI, and it is an audience insights tool that uses synthetic audiences to come up with new media and creative strategies. AudienceGPT is our flagship product. It's the product that's taken us furthest, and we were really pleased to win a Campaign Tech Award in 2025, being recognized by some of the biggest people in our industry. This is the kind of tooling that is front and center when it comes to how we work with our clients and one of the reasons they would use us over somebody else. We also think about AI in terms of making our own jobs better. We do a lot of work with LinkedIn around influencer marketing and the impact influencer marketing campaigns are having across multiple different territories. As you can imagine, there's a huge amount of data involved in these kind of campaigns, collecting, processing, synthesizing and crucially reporting on that data is a very substantial task for our teams to do. We are using AI to make that process smoother, quicker and far less of a problem for our teams to deliver on an always-on basis. Another way that we're using AI is to actually understand more about how AI systems are changing the way our clients are working. This demo that we're showing you is for one of the largest insurers in the U.K. who are particularly focused on home and motor insurance products. Now when they came to us, they came with quite a specific problem, something that we've seen across most of the industry, particularly in retail and e-commerce. Somewhere between 10% and 30% of some of our clients' website traffic no longer comes from a standard Google or web search. It comes from an LLM. It's the recommendation that a large language model gives to a user. And I'm not sure about how much you guys are using the latest chatbots, but there is huge volumes of traffic now coming from Perplexity, from ChatGPT, from Claude and from the [ Bard ] . And one of the most important things for our customers is how they rank inside those models. How well does one insurer look against the other? How effective is New Balance at marketing its new trainers versus Nike. This is effectively how we're using AI to report, score and rank our clients inside other people's AI models. Finally, we think about combining a number of our different tools. This is a demo that we've been taking for a very large European travel company, showing you how we can create content at scale using our AdStudio product and then use AudienceGPT to test and rank the creative impact of that product. This is only a simple example. And as you can imagine, this can be deployed across a number of different clients all at the same time, but we're definitely seeing that our AdStudio product is again a reason why certain clients come to us. It's also quite important in terms of the workflow for our clients. As you'll see, them being able to approve content inside a single platform makes a big difference to how we work together and again, removes layers of reporting and workflow. Internally, at Brave Bison, we feel that the next major financial target for us is taking the business from approximately GBP 10 million of EBITDA today to GBP 25 million of EBITDA over the medium term. We see that growth coming from 3 different angles. Firstly, we think there is a very compelling organic growth story for Brave Bison and the businesses that we've acquired over the last 12 months. We think that BBX fundamentally underpins a growth story for our consultancy and marketing services business. It allows us to compete more effectively against our competitors and deliver work at better margins, which in turn flows through to either stronger ability to compete on price or a much more effective outcome. We also see MiniMBA, which recorded about 18% growth year-on-year for the first half of this year as being a major growth story for Brave Bison. Secondly, we think that bolt-on acquisitions are something that can have a real impact on our business. Last year, we made 4 bolt-on acquisitions. We acquired businesses at between GBP 3 million and GBP 10 million of enterprise value. We integrate them into our operating platform, Philippa will talk to you about a little bit later. And we take out significant amounts of cost within the first 3 months of trading, and we improve outcomes for customers within the first 9 months of trading. Builtvisible, for example, was an excellent business that we acquired and have now integrated wholly into the Brave Bison performance proposition. We no longer go to market as Builtvisible, but all of those clients and all of that know-how has been injected into our business. Finally, we're very excited about platform acquisitions, acquiring new companies that still take from the CMO, from the marketing budget, but do so by selling a slightly different product service or software. Previously, we were in marketing delivery, then we moved into selling media through our media network. And now we're selling marketing excellence through the MiniMBA. And with our strategic investment in System1, we're now selling marketing effectiveness. These products all come together, and they're all bought by the CMO, but they sell services, software, data and insight in different ways, often with different margin profiles. And we see Brave Bison growing through platform acquisitions as well as bolt-ons.

Here, you can see the key areas which we focus on when it comes to integrating our acquisitions as well as how our approach varies between those bolt-ons, which we incorporated into existing business units, platform acquisitions such as the MiniMBA and one slightly in the middle where we have an integration-light approach such as MTM, which has more mature existing processes. We have central teams dedicated to each of the areas here and a clear playbook in terms of how we roll this out. Finance is obviously a key area of focus. We implement immediate changes on acquisition around the 2-week forecasting cadence, group reporting packs, deadlines and such like. And then there's a medium-term piece as we centralize transactional finance, ensure best practice controls and look at finance system migrations. HR is another area which we look to centralize in all cases, standardizing benefits and offering support to staff and around recruitment processes. We have a strong central function in growth and marketing, which immediately supports in relation to the bolt-ons. For the integration-light approach, we still offer central support on elements such as event organization, thought leadership and similar. This is less centralized for acquisitions like the MiniMBA, which is more specific marketing needs and its own team in place. Resource management is a really important one for us, particularly across our services businesses. Moving all acquisitions onto the same platform and the same resource management tool allows us to be more efficient and utilize staff in different areas of the business rather than bringing in freelancers. It also enables us to take the right hiring decisions and drive margins up. IT and systems, we look to integrate over the first few months following an acquisition. So we are all on the same operating system, all on the same stack and all comply with the same levels of cybersecurity. Some acquisitions, such as MiniMBA will keep elements in-house as they have specific IT requirements around the platform, of course, it's offered on and the way payments are collected.

So in March, we were delighted to become the largest shareholder in System1 Group plc with a stake of just over 27%. System1 is a marketing effectiveness company that helps the world's biggest advertisers predict whether their advertising will actually work before they spend millions of dollars. Using tools like Test Your Ad and Test Your Innovation, System1 measures the emotional reactions consumers have to a piece of creative and translates that into a forecast of likely sales and brand impact. In short, it's a creative effectiveness platform, selling brands the confidence that their advertising spend is backing winning ideas rather than duds. We are now a Board observer and are working closely with the Board and the executive team to drive shareholder value.

So for shareholders, existing and new, we think there are 5 key takeaways from this presentation and our results. The first is that FY '25 was ahead of expectations and a year of transformational growth for Brave Bison. The second is that FY '26 has been upgraded versus our prior forecast, and that is despite the fact that a number of projects have, in fact, been paused, delayed or pushed as a result of disruption in the Middle East. If that disruption were to abate or those projects were to come back, that would be incremental to our current forecasting. Thirdly, MiniMBA is absolutely flying. The business is growing at 18% year-on-year for the April cohort. It's probably above 20% if you compare it to the September cohort from last year. We're very pleased with this business performance, and we hope to see that growth continue. Fourth, Brave Bison has a very clear strategy on AI, not just how we work with our clients, but how we work with each other. We've made a number of senior hires, and this is being thought about and pushed from the highest levels of our business. Finally, our investment in System1 is really exciting. The business is in a very exciting space. It's in a very exciting time in its journey, and we are now working productively with the management team there to maximize value. So with that, we will open up for questions.

[Operator Instructions] I would like to remind you that a recording of this presentation along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A can be accessed investor dashboard. Oliver, at this point, if I may hand over to you to chair the Q&A, and I'll pick up from you at the end. Thank you.